1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a coating method for producing a coating of a heat-soluble material, and a coating apparatus to achieve this and a method of cleaning the coating of the heat-soluble material. Further a printer, printed matter, and a display apparatus made by utilizing them.
2. Description of the Prior Art
At present, as a personal and handy printer, a thermal transfer printer is typically employed. This printer has various defects, however, such as a slow recording speed and high operational cost, i.e., a high unit price per sheet. In a thermal printer using a line head (i.e., a thermal head made by arranging the heating elements to correspond with the full width of a sheet of paper), there is required a sheet of thermal ink-transfer ribbon [a ribbon made of PET (polyethylene terephthalate) having a thickness of 3.about.6.mu. coated with heat-soluble ink in 3.about.5.mu.] per sheet of A4 size print. Accordingly, the printing cost is very high. On the other hand, in the serial type printer, the ribbon is used only for the portions to be printed, so that the consumption of ribbon is relatively small. In reality, however, in the latter system, the ribbon is required to be housed in a cassette so as to facilitate the ribbon handling, and it costs higher than the line head type printer.
In order to solve the above problems, studies were made on the method of regenerating the ribbon of a heat-soluble material in the printer. (cf. Isamu Nose, et al., "A Color Transfer Printer with Recoating Mechanism" International Symposium Digest of Technical Papers, pp 143-145 (1985)).
However, for the reasons that no uniform coating is obtainable and because the heat-soluble material is deteriorated, the above studies have been unfruitful.